Please join Teachers 4 Social Justice , the Center for Political Education, Vampire Slayers, and Rethinking Schools for a critical dialogue on the intersection between school closures, the current attacks on City College of San Francisco, and forces of gentrification. We will be joined by Pauline Lipman, an activist scholar on the coordinating committee of Teachers for Social Justice in Chicago, and a nationally recognized analyst of the school closure epidemic and the connection between school closings and gentrification.

Public education is now under a withering assault from forces of privatization and gentrification. City College of San Francisco is being rapidly downsized and threatened with closure. To win our local struggles, we need a big-picture analysis of the epidemic of K-12 school closures going on all over the country, overwhelmingly in African American and Latino/a communities—particularly in gentrifying neighborhoods, where thousands of low-income housing units are also being demolished. Everywhere charter schools spring up in the place of public schools, often in the same spruced-up buildings—private, non-union, often with selective admission schools that exclude the children of the closed public schools. Pauline Lipman calls this a corporate “business plan masquerading as an education plan.” Postsecondary organizers MUST understand the K-12 playbook, because that story is played out 30 years further.

What is the resistance movement that is now under way at the national level? How does it articulate issues of racism/white supremacy? How can we build an effective movement that can really impact and ultimately stop this motion? How can we articulate compelling alternatives toward transformative education justice and the right to the city?

Suggested Donation of $5-$10 at the door. No one turned away for lack of funds.